Research & Development
Quality Challenges in Drug Delivery
The role for quality by design and excipients
Drug delivery companies and the products borne from them are often characterised by complex partnerships between companies with licensing agreements and strategic relationships The challenges they seek to face and overcome rely upon strong technology delivering drugs to targeted sites in the patient Outsourcing of opportunities has dramatically...
Electronic Health Records and Clinical Research
Electronic Health Records and Clinical Research
The past ten years have been a time of revolutionary change in both clinical research and healthcare The clinical documentation tasks in both of these industries are undergoing a complete transition from paper to electronic data entry and processing In healthcare Electronic Health Records EHR have been extensively adopted in some healthcare setting...
The Asian Vaccine Industry
Opportunities and challenges
Pele ChoiSing Chong Investigator and Director Vaccine Research Development Center National Health Research Institutes Taiwan Background As Nelson Mandela once wrote life or death for a young child too often depends on whether he is born in a country where the vaccines are available or not this may be regarded as a political descriptio
Getting to the Heart of a Tumour Cell
Targeting the nucleus
Despite billions of dollars spent on research every year cancer remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide Understanding of the molecular mechanisms underpinning many cancers has progressed rapidly but our ability to treat the disease remains limited Most cancer therapeutics rely upon the ability of the agent to eradicate tumour cells suc...
Similar Biologics
A golden bird to tame
In the past three decades biotechnologyled medicines have revolutionised the treatment of several life threatening and rare diseases The substances produced by living cells and used in the treatment diagnosis or prevention of diseases are referred to as biologic drugs or biologics or biopharmaceuticals or recombinant therapeutics Since the approval...
Drug Discovery
A decentralised multi-polar model
The pharmaceutical industry has major long standing problems with its RD productivity Its core model to discover and develop drugs has not changed in the last years The problem is that the pharmaceutical industry is actually not very innovative in translating invention and discovery from academics into commercial space The failure of the pharmaceu...
Transforming Drug Development
A fully outsourced model
In a recent article in Scrip Anju Ghangurde reported on Eli Lilly and Companys efforts to effect transformation from a Fully Integrated Pharmaceutical Company FIPCo to a Fully Integrated Pharmaceutical Network FIPNet The foundational thinking in the move to FIPNet is simply that the current pharmaceutical development process is broken and does not...
Collaborative Models for Managing Vaccine Trials in Asia
Over the past decade there has been an explosion in the number of clinical research studies being conducted globally and in particular in resourcelimited settings including in Asia Researchers and pharmaceutical companies have worked earnestly to develop new treatment prevention and diagnostic technologies to tackle the global public health challen...
Biomarkers of Drug-Induced Liver Injury
An update on progress
DILI has been the most frequent single cause of safetyrelated drug marketing withdrawals for the past years and continues to be a significant cause of drug failure Significant effort has been expended to try to reduce the failure rate of drugs due to hepatotoxicity and overtly hepatotoxic agents are typically removed during screening or in preclin...
Changing Face of GPCR Drug Discovery
Opportunistic future
At the outset we should challenge the basic dogma of receptor pharmacology ie one ligand one receptor texture and singular efficacy There is emerging evidence to the contrary ie one ligand differential pharmacology and multiple mechanisms of action GPCR drug hunters and thought leaders have started to accept this paradigm shift and I believe that s...
